According to MailOnline, Kate Moss ‘sparked fan concern as she’s spotted looking “fraught” and “on edge” at Paris Fashion Week’. Good. Kate Moss is one of the very rare celebrities who I’m interested in – because she’s one of the very few celebrities who’s interesting – but in recent years she has become a bit ‘basic’, to use the word she once tossed along with ‘bitch’ at the pilot of the EasyJet plane. Police led her away from the plane after she was caught drinking her own booze after being refused airline hooch. (‘She was not aggressive to anyone and was funny really – the crew were acting out of proportion’, said a co-passenger.)
Zoe Strimpel recently wrote in these pages that Moss has gone from ‘her eff-it philosophy on life’ to Cosmoss, a Victoria Beckham-esque cosmetics line, shot through with a heavy dose of Gwyneth Paltrow. There is a picture of a dewy-skinned Kate on the homepage clutching an oil, plus a section on ‘rituals’ which encourages viewers to ‘join the cosmoss’ by soothing the soul, embracing ‘mindful beauty’ and looking for ‘gentle wellbeing’ with ‘balance, restoration and love’. Nice work if you can get it, but it was never meant to be; you think of sex and drugs when you think of Moss, not serenity and herbs. Her company charges £20 for a box of 20 tea-bags and £125 for a room spray. I’d be wanting a little bit of something illegal for those prices.
So what has Katy done to get her back into the scandal sheets now? Snort coke off a copy of Razzle? Drink absinthe from a flask fashioned from endangered ivory? No. According to the Mail, ‘Kate moves back and forth in her chair as she speaks to other fashion goers at the event and poses for photographers. She is seen hugging a woman sat behind her before being heard saying “Let me just do this”, as she turns to face forward so the picture takers can get the best shot.’ In other words, she behaved like a FROWer at a fashion event.
The Mail likes to think of young people as snowflakes, but it has obviously swallowed the snowflake agenda with this write-up of a woman exchanging pleasantries with friends. This rather desperate attempt to find scandal was repeated a few days later when the Mail espied the reckless jade once more: ‘Kate Moss harks back to her wild partying days as she puffs on a cigarette while holding a beer – days after sparking fan concern with “fraught” appearance at fashion show.’ She’ll be lingering in a beer garden or stopping to chat hatless to a fellow pedestrian next.
I can understand why a generation notorious for its anxiety levels might find Kate Moss’s ease unsettling. They’re most comfortable ‘socialising’ via screens; she’s most comfortable simply hanging out. She probably even lunches with more than one person at a time – the crazy mixed-up kid. But it’s extremely odd for the worldly men and women of the press to get so over-excited about a bit of vivacity and hedonism from a notorious fascinator.
Is the media peeved by the fact that Moss didn’t break the way other famous women did? There were no poor-me confessionals on prime-time TV for this woman of substance(s); perhaps it’s this lack of willingness to express regret that marks her out as being a public enemy?
The usual envious mob, covetous of her effortless beauty and phenomenal earning ability, used to tut that she was ‘a bad role model’
Crucially, Moss’s notorious fondness for sex, drugs and rock and roll never seemed self-destructive but rather a celebration of her good luck; she never gets rattled, appreciating the great benefits that fame bestows. She’s calmed down now – but Kate Moss without a slight whiff of impropriety would be a sad creature, like a Bloody Mary without Tabasco. Those bores who seek a moral from a success story – especially that of a low-born and beautiful woman – will be disappointed that the hoped-for ruin never came. What’s more, with a few little tweaks, she looks the same as she always did; knowing, curious, amused. Bad decisions – mostly to do with men – slide off her like powder from a mirror; she is shameless – as in brazen, yes, but also apparently impossible to blame.
Moss has lived – to put it politely – ever since she decided that she didn’t want to lose her virginity in Croydon and did it instead in the Bahamas on a family holiday at 14. It was coming home from this trip that she was scouted at the airport, the triptych of her life – beauty, sex and travel – all coming together in one perfect moment. That fabulous face was like a reverse mark of Cain, opening any door she cared to knock on. Champagne baths and smashed hotel rooms; hundreds of hangovers and a million mornings after; that 30th birthday party at Claridges, a Bacchanalia that allegedly made Saturday night in Sodom and Gomorrah look like a wet Wednesday in Wales. But nevertheless she kept hold of the common touch; my friend saw her at a spa in Thailand and the first words she heard her say were ‘Is my bum hanging out?’ You can’t imagine Ariana Grande asking that.
She did what she did because it felt good – and because she believed it was no one else’s business what a grown woman gets up to behind closed doors. The usual envious mob, covetous of her effortless beauty and phenomenal earning ability, used to tut that she was ‘a bad role model’. But that was the last thing she ever claimed to be. They’ve given up on the role model business now, but still attempt to make it seem somehow sinister that ‘Kate didn’t appear to have a care in the world as she took a deep drag of her cigarette while clutching onto an open bottle of Corona beer during the leisurely stroll.’ Let’s relish her carefree attitude, and her appreciation of the profoundly enjoyable life she has created for herself.
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